The History Club: Vietnam Declares Independence: September 2, 1945 These are my thoughts about some of the events in history. Tuesday, January 24, 2012 Vietnam Declares Independence: September 2, 1945 After more than six decades of French rule, the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam was formed by the Vietminh in 1945. Vietnam lost her independence on August 25, 1883, after decades of resistance to Europeans, when the court at Hue recognized French protectorate in Tonkin and Annam in North and Central Vietnam respectively. The south, Cochin China was already under French sovereignty. The French Impact The French colonialists transformed many aspects in Vietnamese life. Extensive public works and road building was carried out. But the benefits of these developments did not reach the vast majority of the locals. Heavy taxing and usurious interest rated kept the rural population in constant debt. Even by 1940, the peasant population was more than 85% of the total. Replacement of local village leaders by French trained Vietnamese officials removed the traditional village authority and the communal life style of the villages was also shattered.

Introduction of French law which was administered by French judges, who were generally ignorant of local language and customs, was another death blow to the Vietnamese people. Growth of Nationalism Vietnamese people resisted the French after 1883, well into the 20th Century. A new chapter began with the growth of nationalist organizations. Some of these were Marxist oriented but the leading group, Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD-Vietnamese Nationalist Party) was not. In February 1930, an uprising by VNQDD was crushed by the French authorities. The decimation of these nationalists paved way for the Communists to fill the vacuum among the freedom fighters for a national organization. The Communists were instrumental in forming the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam, commonly known as Viet Minh) a decade later. However, this group was an alliance of democrats, socialists, communists and other interested groups. Japanese Intervention In 1940, with France defeated and Vichy France in power, the Japanese were able to establish military bases in Northern Vietnam.

Japan took complete control of Indochina on March 9, 1945, months after the liberation of France by the Allied forces. To the Viet Minh, the Japanese were just another invader, which was a fact epitomized by their slogan, “Neither the French, nor the Japanese as masters”. August Revolution and Declaration of Independence The same week the Japanese surrendered, the Viet Minh held a congress in Caobang, near the Chinese border, where a provisional government was formed. This government took control in Hanoi after some minor, scattered clashes with the Japanese troops and puppet militia on August 19. Soon the country was largely under the Viet Minh. The puppet ‘Emperor’ Bao Dai abdicated. Declaring his abdication in a remarkable document, it was stated that, “We cannot but regret the thought of our twenty years’ reign during which it was impossible for us to render any appreciable service to our country”. He ended by declaring, “Long live the independence of Vietnam! Long live the Democratic Republic!” The government issued the declaration of independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945.

It accused the French imperialists of depriving the Vietnamese of their liberties, imposing inhuman laws upon them, ruining the country’s resources, building more prisons than schools among other things. “They have drowned our revolution in blood”, it further stated. For these reasons, they broke off all ties to the French and stated that the leaders of the provisional government “…..solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country-and in fact it is so already”. Long Road to Peace Almost simultaneously, the British arrived in Cochin China and started to ‘restore order’ for the interests of France. In doing so, they even got the assistance of the Japanese troops remaining in the country, just days after the British and Japanese had stopped shooting each other in Burma, not so far away from Vietnam. By the end of the year, French troops were able to arrive take their colonial lands once again. France tried to defeat the viet minh both militarily and politically, even bringing in Bao Dai back, coaxing him to form a puppet national government to counter the Democratic Republic. The Viet Minh fought on for 8 years until the French met their nemesis at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

But, it was to take more than two more decades for Vietnam to see peace in the country when it was re-unified under the communist rule in 1975. Sources Primary Source- Vietnam: History, Documents and Opinions on a Major World Crisis ed. Marvin E. Gettleman. Fawcett Publications Inc. USA (1965). From the above source, the following excerpts were also referred Jumper, Roy and Normand, Marjorie Weiner, Vietnam: The Historical Background Isaacs, Harold, Independence for Vietnam? Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Sep. 2, 1945. Abdication of Bao Dai, Emperor of Annam August, 1945. Image: "Vo Nguyen Giap (left), the military leader and Ho Chi Minh (right) the political leader of Vietnamese independence struggle." In Ha Noi (1945). From Wikimedia Commons. Posted by Vietnam 1945 - The derailed revolution Vietnam 1945 - The derailed revolution Tweet In 1975 the Vietnamese people gained a historic victory, driving out the US armed forces and liberating the south.

After 28 years of war the country was reunited and capitalism and landlordism abolished throughout. With these heroic sacrifices, the Vietnamese workers and peasants paid the price for the defeat of the revolution of 1945,when they had power in their grasp. Why was this opportunity lost in 1945? What are the lessons of this defeat for the workers' struggle today? In 1975 the Vietnamese people gained a historic victory, driving out the US armed forces and liberating the south. After 28 years of war - costing two million Vietnamese lives, the defoliation of 10% of the total land area, and the destruction of much of industry and transport - the country was reunited and capitalism and landlordism abolished throughout. With these heroic sacrifices, the Vietnamese workers and peasants paid the price for the defeat of the revolution of 1945, when they had power in their grasp. Why was this opportunity lost in 1945? What are the lessons of this defeat for the workers' struggle today? Vietnam was a French colony from the mid 19th century, exploited for its raw materials and cheap labour by the French monopolies.

Under French rule, illiteracy rose by 80 per cent. While 6000-7000 local landlords and colonialists owned vast holdings of the best land, half the peasant majority were landless, and the rest owned tiny plots. Companies such as Michelin operated rubber plantations using mainly forced labour. Workers became known as "fertiliser for the rubber trees" because the bodies of those who died toiling in inhuman conditions were buried on the plantations. Industrial development was retarded by colonial rule. But a small working class developed in industry, the mines, and transport. Despite severe repression, workers and peasants began to engage in struggle against the harsh conditions forced upon them - and for national liberation. It was from within this movement that the Indochinese Communist Party was formed in 1930 under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Although this Party had strong local roots and considerable mass support, it was critically influenced by developments in the Soviet Union where many of its leaders had been trained, and to which it looked for guidance and support. The Communist International, to which the Vietnamese CP belonged, was born after the Russian revolution as an instrument to further the struggle of workers worldwide for democracy and socialism.

However in the 1920s a privileged bureaucracy usurped political power from the working class in Russia. While this bureaucracy rested on - and developed - the nationalised and planned economy of the Soviet Union, its privilege depended on the total suppression of workers' democracy. Increasingly, it transformed the Communist International into an instrument of its own interests. By the 1930s the CI was a consciously counter-revolutionary force, with the Stalinist bureaucracy terrified of the effect the establishment of a democratic workers' state anywhere in the world would have on workers within the Soviet Union. The Russian revolution had been living proof of the fact that, even in an economically backward country like Tsarist Russia, the liberation of the peasantry from landlordism, and the achievement of democracy, depended on the working class coming to power. This was the understanding around which Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik party led the working class in the October Revolution of 1917. As Trotsky had explained, the capitalist class in the underdeveloped countries was too weak to play any progressive role. Against the masses, they were tied up with the forces of imperialism and landlordism.

Faced with a mass movement of workers and peasants, they would inevitably support the side of reaction for fear of losing their privileges. Reflecting the interests of the bureaucracy, however, the Communist International under Stalin argued that, in the underdeveloped countries, a "two-stage revolution" was necessary. First there was supposed to be an alliance with the "progressive capitalists" to achieve national independence and democratic rights on a capitalist basis. Only "later" would the struggle for workers' power and socialism be placed on the agenda. This was the same false position which had been put forward by the Mensheviks before the Russian Revolution. When the workers overthrew the Tsar in February 1917, and held power in their hands their Menshevik leaders entered and propped up a capitalist "provisional government" which was neither "progressive" nor democratic. Lenin and Trotsky denounced this policy, and convinced the majority of the working class of the need to take power. Had they not done so it was almost inevitable that the "provisional government" would have been replaced by a bloody military dictatorship.

In China in the 1920s, in the name of a "two-stage" theory, the Chinese CP dissolved itself into the bourgeois Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai Shek. A huge movement of workers and peasants drove towards power, but, deprived of leadership, was turned upon and defeated by the "progressive bourgeois" Chiang Kai Shek. The idea of a "progressive' capitalist class was equally inappropriate in Vietnam. Discriminatory restrictions imposed by the French administration had effectively debarred the Vietnamese from entering industry, finance and commerce. "National" capitalist development was restricted to money-lending and the landlord class. This class tended to take out French citizenship and send their children to French schools. They were loyal supporters of colonial rule. The policies of the Communist International received their first serious test in Vietnam with the coming to power of a "Popular Front" government in France in 1936. This was a government of class-compromise in which the Socialist and Communist Parties joined, or supported, a coalition with so-called "progressive bourgeois forces" against the menace of Fascism.

The CP was following in fact Stalin's foreign policy which, from the mid-1930s, sought alliances with anti-German capitalist powers, in particular French imperialism. The accession in France of a government including the CP encouraged the masses in Vietnam. There was an upsurge in the struggle and organisation of the working class. But the class-collaborationist "Popular Front" had no intention of liberating the colonies, or indeed of major colonial reform. Trade unions continued to be banned, and workers' leaders jailed - including the Communist Nguyen Van Tao. The French Colonial minister, a member of the reformist Socialist Party, telegraphed to Vietnam that "French order must reign in Indo-china as elsewhere." What was the response of the Communist Party leadership in Vietnam? The slogans "Down with imperialism!" and "Confiscate the land of the big landowners!" were "temporarily withdrawn". The "two-stage" theory was based on the false idea that the "national" bourgeoisie would struggle for independence against imperialism. But policies of class compromise, once begun, know no stages. In slavish obedience to Stalinist policies of class compromise in Europe, the Vietnamese CP was now compromising with…the imperialist bourgeois and the feudal landlords!

The CP Councillors on the Saigon city municipal council eventually voted in favour of taxes for "national defence" - taxes for colonial suppression. After all had not Stalin told the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval in 1935 that he "understood and approved completely the policy of national defence of France"? In opposition to Stalinism and the two-stage theory, political groups developed in Vietnam in the 1930s supporting Trotsky's ideas, and increasingly these gained dominance in the growing trade union movement. They also won control from the Communists in a political grouping organised around the newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle). In 1939 elections took place for the Cochin-Chinese (South Vietnamese) Colonial Council. This was a relatively powerless body, based on a restricted franchise disqualifying many workers. Nevertheless the Trotskyist candidates Ta Thu Thau, Tran Van Tach and Pan Van Hum were elected with 80% of the vote, defeating the Communist and bourgeois party candidates. Membership of the Trotskyist parties grew to around 5000, and the CP split with a considerable part of its working-class membership joining the Trotskyists. The historian J.

Buttinger commented of this period: "…the Communist party for several years was overshadowed by a Trotskyist movement so strong as to make it for a short time the leading group in the entire communist and nationalist camp." But with the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939 all the worker's parties were made illegal and severe repression launched. Ta Thu Thau and Tran Van Thach were imprisoned along with many others on the infamous island concentration camp of Poulo Condor, where prisoners were kept like animals in tiny underground cages. In 1940 the armies of Japanese imperialism occupied Vietnam. France had fallen to the Nazis - and for most of the war the Japanese allowed the collaborationist Vichy regime to govern Vietnam. As the war drew to a close, however, they decided the French administration could not be relied on, and replaced it with a puppet government headed by the former Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai. In May 1941 the Vietminh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) was formed on the initiative of the Communist Party, and launched a guerrilla war against the Japanese from bases near the Chinese border in the rural north. By 1945 conditions had become desperate for the mass of people.

Famine ravaged the north of the country, killing an estimated 2 million people - while the Japanese exported rice to feed their troops. When Japan surrendered to the Allied powers in August 1945 the stage was set for a massive social explosion. Throughout the south, but particularly in Saigon, People's Committees equivalent to Soviets sprang up and began to take over. Peasants seized land from the landlords, and workers took control of factories. The prospects for the formation of a democratic socialist state could not have been better. For this to have been established it was necessary for the existing state machine to be smashed, and the "people's committees" to become linked together into a new democratic state power, based on the working class. But the leadership of the CP was imbued with the spirit of class collaboration implicit in the "two stage" theory. This was reflected in the class composition of the party. An internal party report was later to disclose that only one in thirteen of its members in key positions were workers, and less than 20% were peasants. The vast majority were intellectuals and members of the urban middle class. Above all the party leadership feared the independent movement of the masses, particularly the working class influenced by Trotskyist ideas.

In the rural north the CP dominated Vietminh declared independence on September 2 in Hanoi but, in line with the "two stage theory", on the basis of a firmly bourgeois constitution modelled on the American Declaration of Independence. The government included members of the right-wing nationalist party Quoc Dan Dang. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh even obtained the Imperial gold seal of office and ruby-encrusted sword from the discredited puppet leader Bo Dai, and appointed him "Supreme Political Adviser"! In the south, on August 21, after mass demonstrations by workers in Saigon, a provisional Central Committee for the People's Committees was established. Most of the political parties came together to form a "United National Front". A situation of dual power, as had existed after the February revolution in Russia, was arising. The CP was relatively weak in the more economically developed south with its more militant working class. Desperate to control the situation, it allied itself with the right wing of the UNF. On August 23 at 5 am, in a conscious attempt to bypass the People's Committees, the CP seized power by means of a coup.

It used the prestige of the Vietminh to give itself mass credibility, and pressurised various bourgeois nationalist leaders to enter a coalition government called the "Committee of the South". This CP-led government immediately set out to crush the mass movement. CP leader Nguyen Van Tao declared: "Those who incite the peasants to take over the estates will be severely and mercilessly punished ... Our government, I repeat, is a democratic and middle-class government, even though the Communists are now in power." The working class had created a number of workers' militias to defend the revolution. In Saigon these came together to form a Workers' Guard under Trotskyist leadership. This was viewed with horror by the CP leaders. "Those who incite the people to take up arms will be considered as saboteurs and provocateurs, enemies of national independence," they screamed. Instead, they declared: "Our democratic liberties will be guaranteed by our democratic allies." Who were these "democratic allies"? In pursuit of their own imperialist interests, the "Allied" powers had fought against Nazi Germany - on the same side as Russia. But this did not mean that the imperialists had turned into guarantors of democracy - as the Russian bureaucracy maintained.

Yet this was the position uncritically accepted by the leadership of the Vietnamese CP. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945, Stalin had reached agreement with Roosevelt and Churchill on the post-war division of the world into "spheres of influence". Stalin had little interest in the struggle in South-East Asia and concurred in an agreement which split Vietnam in two at the 16th Parallel. To supervise the Japanese surrender, the north was "assigned" to reactionary Chinese warlords who were principally interested in what they could loot; the south to the British army. It was these imperialist powers that the Stalinist bureaucracy labelled "democratic allies" - and whose occupation of Vietnam the Vietnamese CP leadership slavishly supported. Thus, instead of carrying forward the struggle for a new workers' state, the CP leadership collaborated in propping up the colonial state machine - resting now on "Allied" armies, rather than the Japanese. From September 12, British troops, mostly Indian Gurkhas, commanded by General Gracey started to arrive.

They were greeted with demonstrations organised by the Vietminh with the slogan (in English) "Welcome to the Allies!" The Vietminh even turned over their own headquarters to the British forces. The Peoples' Committees denounced the Vietminh collaboration with the British forces. As a result, on September 14 the Vietminh police chief and Communist Party stalwart Duong Bach Mai, sent an armed detachment to where the Peoples' Committees were meeting in assembly. They broke it up, tearing down the red flags that bedecked its assembly rooms, destroying its records, and arresting and imprisoning its leaders. But, despite CP assistance in crushing a popular movement, General Gracey did not share their illusions in class-compromises. As he later remarked: "I was welcomed on arrival by the Vietminh. I promptly kicked them out." He closed down the press, banned demonstrations, and declared martial law. On September 22 British troops were sent to take over the Saigon jail. They disarmed the Vietnamese guards, released the French troops imprisoned there, and rearmed them. Together the British and French took over the key installations in the city, ousted the Vietnamese government from the Saigon town hall and arrested its leaders.

Thus did Vietnam's four-week old independence come to an end. By dawn of September 23 the coup was complete. The French troops engaged in an orgy of violence against any Vietnamese they could find. There were, as a British reporter, Tom Driberg (later a Labour MP) described it "disgraceful scenes of vengeance". The masses responded magnificently to the attempt to re-impose colonial rule. An insurrection followed and most of Saigon was taken over by the workers. Mass demonstrations rocked the city, the market was burned down and barricades erected. Power plants and the radio station were attacked and a general offensive launched against the imperialist forces. Faced with revolution, General Gracey then rearmed... the Japanese troops! Indeed in the battles that followed the Japanese sustained more casualties than the Allied forces combined. With a leadership determined to establish a workers' democracy the Vietnamese workers and peasants could have issued a fraternal class appeal to the ranks of the troops fighting against them - and split and paralysed the enemy forces. The collapse of fascism at the end of the war had an enormous radicalising effect on workers the world over, and this mood infected the war-weary troops of all nations.

Moreover General Gracey's troops were Indian Gurkhas who could not fail to have been affected by the struggle for independence in India which was then approaching victory. They were particularly incensed by the re-arming of the Japanese troops: military documents record that this policy was carried out "outrageous as it seemed to all the ranks at the time." A clear class appeal to these troops would undoubtedly have had a tremendous impact. An indication of the potential that existed for such a class-based appeal was offered by the example of the Japanese forces, who at the end of the war began to disintegrate on class lines. This process was described by the historian Vu Ngu Chien: "Some Japanese leaned towards the Vietminh, releasing Communist prisoners, providing weapons to the Vietminh front, and even offering their services to the local Vietminh forces. Others, including the military commanders, wanted to use their forces to support Kim's government (the Vietnamese puppet government) and to crush the Etsumei [Vietminh]." Instead the Vietminh leadership, still trying to hold back the mass struggle, negotiated a cease-fire in early October. This merely allowed the French to bring in more troops.

When the cease-fire broke down the imperialist forces launched an offensive with unqualified savagery, attacking combatants and civilians alike - a harsh precursor of American strategy 20 years later. The British command issued the following directive: "We may find it difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Always use the maximum force available to ensure wiping out any hostiles we may meet. If one uses too much no harm is done." The Vietnamese workers fought heroically with the meagre resources at their disposal, attacking the docks, airport, and Allied bases, using spears and poisoned arrows in some cases - impressing even the experienced Allied troops with their courage and daring. They were met with mortars and field-guns in an indiscriminate slaughter. Officially 2700 Vietnamese were killed, though the real figure was many times higher. While the workers were battling desperately to defend the revolution, the main concern of the CP leadership was to eliminate all opposition to themselves. Foremost among their targets were the Trotskyists who had consistently opposed their incorrect policies.

Even during the World War the CP, branding the Trotskyists in the words of Ho Chi Minh as "stooges of the fascists", had shown no qualms in collaborating with the French against the Trotskyist movement. In 1941 it had betrayed 15 activists to the authorities - leading to their arrest. Now the CP leaders set up "honourable squads" with the "honourable" task of exterminating anyone who opposed them. The leadership of the Struggle group, meeting to co-ordinate military action against the French, were surrounded by one of these groups, arrested, and then shot. Among the murdered was Tran Van Thach, released only a few weeks earlier from Poulo Condor. Ta Thu Thau, the other leading Trotskyist, had gone to the north of the country to help organise famine relief. Ellen Hammer, an American writer, described what happened on his return. "On orders from Hanoi he was arrested on the way. He was tried three times by local Peoples' Committees and acquitted each time. But Tran Van Giau [the CP leader], ruthless in the pursuit of power, reportedly felt that his position in the South was being threatened by Ta Thau's popularity.

He seems to have served a sort of ultimatum on the Vietminh Central Committee in Hanoi - either himself or Thau - and Hanoi gave way. Ta Thu Thau was killed in Quang Ngai, Annam, on the orders of Tran Van Giau." Thau had been a leader of workers in China in the abortive uprising of the Canton Commune of 1927 in China, and had survived its defeat by counter-revolutionary troops. He spent years in prison including six years in Paulo Condor, where torture had left him partially paralysed. He had been elected to the Saigon Municipal Council and the Cochin China Colonial Council on several occasions. While on the one hand murdering this workers' leader, the CP leaders were on the other hand desperately trying to appease the imperialist powers. A few months later Ho Chi Minh commented on the death of Thau: "He was a great patriot and we mourn him ... All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken." What was this "line"? In November 1945 the CP voluntarily disbanded itself! The declaration it issued took the "two-stage" theory to its logical conclusion.

"In order to complete the Party's tasks in this immense movement of the Vietnamese people's emancipation a national union conceived without distinction of class or parties is an indispensable factor." It further emphasised that it was "...always disposed to put the interests of the country above that of the clases..." But even the defence of national independence was impossible - once this struggle was consciously divorced from the struggles of the working class and poor peasantry. This was soon to be shown, disastrously, in practice. At this time the French had no troops in the north, and the French commander Leclerc was quite candid about his weakness: "We never intended to launch an armed conquest of North Indochina...To do that we would need forces much stronger than those we now have." But Leclerc played on the weakness shown by the class-compromising CP leadership. He proposed an agreement to the Vietminh, which they signed in March 1946, whereby Vietnamese "independence in the French Union" was recognized - in return for allowing French troops to occupy the North! When the agreement was announced, the Vietnamese people were stunned.

Ho Chi Minh, speaking to a mass meeting in Hanoi, was forced to plead with his audience, "I swear to you I have not sold you out." "Independence in the French Union" meant nothing less than continued colonial rule. The "agreement" simply allowed the French time to reinforce their forces, and re-impose colonial rule north and south effectively. The March agreement was repeatedly violated by the French, and broke down completely in November when the French bombarded the port of Haiphong, killing 6000 people according to "official" estimates - though the real figure was nearer 20000. The French began a general rout of the Vietminh, who - whilst Ho Chi Minh pathetically petitioned the Allied powers, the Pope, and others - were forced to retreat underground and into the countryside to start what was to be a 30 year guerrilla war for the recovery of national independence. Although the main responsibility for the defeat of the 1945 Vietnamese revolution rested with the Vietnamese CP leaders, the leaders of the working class in Britain and France also played a shameful role. In Britain there was a Labour government headed by Clement Attlee.

Before the war Attlee had written that "the Labour Party is of course opposed to imperialism, whether in its old or new form." Yet the 1945 Labour government agreed to the British occupation of South Vietnam, confining itself to ordering General Gracey: "Sole mission: disarm the Japanese. Do not get involved in keeping order." However it was typical reformist blindness to expect public-school and Sandhurst-trained officers to betray their loyalty to their class and imperialism. Gracey went ahead to "keep order", i.e. crush the revolution - and was unhindered by the Labour government. Attlee was reduced to reassuring Labour critics that "you may be certain that the government is carrying out the principles for which it has always stood." Right-wing Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin made no secret as to where he stood. He commended "the close and friendly cooperation between British and French commanders," and spoke on behalf of the "liberal attitude on the part of the French government." If the Labour Party leadership in Britain tacitly supported imperialism, the role of the French Communist Party leadership was even more reactionary. The post-war agreements between Stalin and the Western powers had put France into the Western sphere of influence.

Despite the fact that the Communist Party in France could have taken power after the war and carried through socialist revolution its policy, following Stalin's line, was not to challenge capitalism. It became part of a coalition similar to the "Popular Front" of 1936 - and with a similar role. Without criticism from the CP, this class-collaborationist government effectively supported the re-colonisation of Vietnam! A report prepared for the Vietnamese Communists by the French CP advised them to be sure that their struggle "meets the requirements of Soviet policy". It warned that any "premature adventures" in Vietnamese independence "might not be in line with Soviet perspectives", and urged a policy of "patience". This was two days after the British-engineered coup deposed the Vietminh government, and launched the savage reprisals by the French forces that followed!

Later the French CP leader Maurice Thorez, a vice premier in the government, remarked to a Vietnamese delegation that "the Communist party under no circumstances wished to be considered the eventual liquidator of the French position in Indo-China and that he ardently wished to see the French flag fly over all corners of the French Union." Unbelievably in 1945 and 1946 the Communist Party MPs in France repeatedly voted for the military budget which included funds especially earmarked for French troops in Vietnam; opposed Socialist party attempts to reduce the budget; and supported sending congratulations to the French Expeditionary corps in December 1946 after it had bombarded Haiphong! Eight years of war followed before the French were defeated in 1954. Then after the Vietminh granted disastrous concessions in the subsequent settlement - which perpetuated the partitioning of the country - another 20 years of war followed against US imperialism and its puppets in the south before capitalism and landlordism were overthrown throughout Vietnam. These struggles will always be an inspiration to socialists everywhere.

Yet even today, despite the substantial social gains of land reform and nationalization of industry, the Vietnamese people have had to pay for the defeat of a workers' revolution in 1945 in the rule of a privileged Stalinist bureaucracy, implacably hostile to workers' democracy, and fighting wars against similar bureaucracies in China and Kampuchea in pursuit of their national self-interest. The record of the CP leadership in the defeated 1945 revolution will fill every socialist fighter with resolve that the disastrous Stalinist policies of "two-stageism" and Popular Frontism must be rooted out of the workers' movement internationally, in order to prepare for the victory of workers' democracy and socialism in the new and greater battles that lie ahead. First published in the South African Marxist magazine Inqaba Ya Basabenzi September 1986 issue 20/21 The August Revolution of 1945 | Study.com The August Revolution of 1945 Watch short & fun videos Start Your Free Trial Today Instructor: Karen Schweitzer Add to Add to Add to Want to watch this again later? Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Custom Courses are courses that you create from Study.com lessons.

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Vietnam has been a colony, divided into multiple countries, and pieced back together. However, the start of its independence occurred in the August Revolution of 1945. In this lesson, we'll explore this moment and what it meant for Vietnam. Vietnam Wars Most Americans have heard of the Vietnam War because, well, we fought in it. But how much do you really know about Vietnam? Why were we fighting there in the first place? The Vietnam War was fought over the spread of communism into Vietnam, but this was actually only the last of a series of conflicts all based around the Vietnamese fight for independence. So, while we think of Vietnam and imagine the 1960s and 1970s, we actually need to go back a little further to 1945, and the August Revolution that kicked off Vietnam's quest for independence. French Indochina and the Background to Revolution To understand the start of Vietnamese independence, we need to first understand Vietnam while it was still…dependent. That means talking about Vietnam before it was Vietnam. On the eve of WWII, it was still French Indochina, a colony in the French Empire.

Vietnamese nationalists had been waiting for a chance to lead a movement against the colonial government, and that opportunity came in 1940 when France itself was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. One leader in particular, Ho Chi Minh, used this to gather widespread support and in 1941 helped organize the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh. Throughout the war, Ho led the Viet Minh against both French troops, who were more concerned with liberating France, and invading Japanese armies. Although Ho himself was communist, the Viet Minh was purely a nationalist group, fighting for independence, and included people of a wide range of political beliefs. When Japan was bombed by the United States in 1945, a power vacuum was created as both French and Japanese forces withdrew. The Viet Minh were ready. French Indochina The August Revolution In August of 1945, as world leaders were planning to divide Indochina between China and Britain, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh took control of a territory in the north of the country and called for a national uprising. People from across Vietnam, particularly the north, flocked to the call and quickly occupied the capital city of Hanoi.

The revolution was fast, it was unexpected and it was decisive. It was also far from over. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh formally declared independence for Vietnam. In his speech, he directly quoted the American Declaration of Independence and committed Vietnam to the ideologies of freedom and self-determination. The Viet Minh during the August Revolution The Viet Minh declaration didn't stop Vietnam from being invaded. Chinese forces marched into the north, soon followed by the French, and British ships raided the south. By October, the southern half of Vietnam was firmly under European control, and the north was largely occupied by China, who was negotiating with France. More afraid of China than France, Ho Chi Minh accepted French control of the south, and in turn, France granted North Vietnam the right to self-governance, provided that they accepted the presence of French troops. While Ho accepted these terms, he did not expect the French to honor them. Turns out, he was right, and France was preparing a larger military force to completely take back North Vietnam. Luckily, Ho was building up his own forces, and by 1946, France and the Viet Minh were back at war.

× August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam | Article about August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam by The Free Dictionary August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam | Article about August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam by The Free Dictionary August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam August Revolution of 1945 in Vietnam a national people’s democratic revolution that overthrew the hegemony of the imperialists in Vietnam and established a popular democratic rule. The August revolution resulted from the development of a national liberation movement in Vietnam against the French colonialists who had subjugated the country in the 1850’s through the 1880’s and against the Japanese invaders who had occupied it in 1940. On May 19, 1941, in accordance with the resolution of the eighth plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Indochina (the GPI; from 1951, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, WPV), a united national liberation front was created, the Vietminh (the League for the Independence of Vietnam), which rallied all the patriotic forces of the country.

Through the Vietminh, the CPI conducted extensive propaganda in 1941–44 and began creating bases and armed detachments. On Dec. 22, 1944, the first detachments of the Vietnamese Liberation Army (now called the People’s Army of Vietnam) began to form in Cao Bang Province. After the coup of Mar. 9, 1945, in which the Japanese imperialists liquidated the French administration, the Vietminh mounted a broad guerrilla war against the Japanese invaders. In April 1945 a Vietminh military-revolutionary conference was held which prepared a plan for the general uprising. On June 4 a liberated area whose center was in the village of Tan Trao in Tuyen Quang Province was formed on the territory of Northern Vietnamese provinces. The CPI held a national conference on Aug. 13–15, 1945, and adopted a resolution on the initiation of a general uprising in Vietnam, the goal of which would be complete independence and the establishment of a popular-based rule. A committee of insurrection was created to lead the uprising.

On August 16 a Vietnamese national congress of the Vietminh was held in Tan Trao; it approved the decision on the commencement of a general uprising, chose the National Committee for the Liberation of Vietnam, headed by Ho Chi Minh, and charged this committee with the functions of a provisional government. In response to the summons of the CPI, the people rose up in insurrection throughout the country during August 16–26. On August 19 armed masses seized Hanoi; on August 20 the People’s Revolutionary Committee of North Vietnam was created in the capital. Everywhere the rebellious people took power into their own hands. On August 24, under the pressure of the revolutionary masses, the emperor Bao Dai was forced to renounce the throne. On Sept. 2, 1945, at a meeting of 500,000 people on Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, in the name of the provisional government, solemnly proclaimed Vietnam’s declaration of independence and the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).

The August revolution came about under the hegemony of the working class allied with the peasantry, the national bourgeoisie, and other patriotic forces rallying under the leadership of the CPI in the unified national liberation front, the Vietminh. It took place amid the destruction of German fascism in Europe by the Soviet Union and the victorious war of the Soviet Union against Japan, which made it easier for the Vietnamese people to achieve victory in their struggle against the French colonialists and Japanese aggressors. The August revolution cleared the way for broad social and economic transformations in Vietnam and greatly influenced the development of the national liberation movement in Southeast Asia, first and foremost in Laos and Cambodia. REFERENCES Vietnam independence proclaimed - Sep 02, 1945 - HISTORY.com Vietnam independence proclaimed Publisher A+E Networks Hours after Japan’s surrender in World War II, Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh declares the independence of Vietnam from France. The proclamation paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence in declaring, “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights, life, liberty, and happiness!” and was cheered by an enormous crowd gathered in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square.

It would be 30 years, however, before Ho’s dream of a united, communist Vietnam became reality. Born in 1890, Ho Chi Minh left Vietnam as a cook on a French steamer in 1911. After several years as a seaman, he lived in London and then moved to France, where he became a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920. He later traveled to the Soviet Union, where he studied revolutionary tactics and took an active role in the Communist International. In 1924, he went to China, where he set about organizing exiled Vietnamese communists. Expelled by China in 1927, he traveled extensively before returning to Vietnam in 1941. There, he organized a Vietnamese guerrilla organization–the Viet Minh–to fight for Vietnamese independence. Japan occupied French Indochina in 1940 and collaborated with French officials loyal to France’s Vichy regime. Ho, meanwhile, made contact with the Allies and aided operations against the Japanese in South China. In early 1945, Japan ousted the French administration in Vietnam and executed numerous French officials.

When Japan formally surrendered to the Allies on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh felt emboldened enough to proclaim the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. French forces seized southern Vietnam and opened talks with the Vietnamese communists. These talks collapsed in 1946, and French warships bombarded the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong, killing thousands. In response, the Viet Minh launched an attack against the French in Hanoi on December 19, 1945–the beginning of the First Indochina War. During the eight-year war, Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists supported the Viet Minh, while the United States aided the French and anti-communist Vietnamese forces. In 1954, the French suffered a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in northwest Vietnam, prompting peace negotiations and the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel at a conference in Geneva. Vietnam was divided into northern and southern regions, with Ho in command of North Vietnam and Emperor Bao Dai in control of South Vietnam. In the late 1950s, Ho Chi Minh organized a communist guerrilla movement in the South, called the Viet Cong.

North Vietnam and the Viet Cong successfully opposed a series of ineffectual U.S.-backed South Vietnam regimes and beginning in 1964 withstood a decade-long military intervention by the United States. Ho Chi Minh died on September 2, 1969, 25 years after declaring Vietnam’s independence from France and nearly six years before his forces succeeded in reuniting North and South Vietnam under communist rule. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after it fell to the communists in 1975. Related Videos Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence (1945) - Vietnam War Vietnam War Search for: Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence (1945) The August Revolution of 1945 saw Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh attempt to take control of Vietnam, following the Japanese surrender and withdrawal. On September 2nd Ho Chi Minh read a declaration of independence in Ba Dinh Square, Hanoi. Its opening lines drew on the American Declaration of Independence, written and signed 169 years earlier: “All men are created equal.

They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless for more than 80 years the French imperialists, abusing the standard of liberty, equality, and fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Centre and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools.

They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion. They have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolised the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers. In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indochina’s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. From that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased.

The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow-citizens died from starvation… Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Viet Minh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property… After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.

For these reasons we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France. We repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland. The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years – such a people must be free and independent. For these reasons we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”

Question: Which country declared independence from France after the 'August Revolution' of 1945?
Answer: VIETNAM